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A first point demanding consideration:
Bodies- those, for example, of animals and plants- are each a
multiplicity founded on colour and shape and magnitude, and on
the forms and arrangement of parts: yet all these elements spring
from a unity. Now this unity must be either Unity-Absolute or
some unity less thorough-going and complete, but necessarily more
complete than that which emerges, so to speak, from the body
itself; this will be a unity having more claim to reality than
the unity produced from it, for divergence from unity involves a
corresponding divergence from Reality. Since, thus, bodies take
their rise from unity, but not "unity" in the sense of the
complete unity or Unity-Absolute- for this could never yield
discrete plurality- it remains that they be derived from a unity
Pluralized. But the creative principle [in bodies] is Soul: Soul
therefore is a pluralized unity.
We then ask whether the plurality here consists of the
Reason-Principles of the things of process. Or is this unity not
something different from the mere sum of these Principles?
Certainly Soul itself is one Reason-Principle, the chief of the
Reason-Principles, and these are its Act as it functions in
accordance with its essential being; this essential being, on the
other hand, is the potentiality of the Reason-Principles. This is
the mode in which this unity is a plurality, its plurality being
revealed by the effect it has upon the external.
But, to leave the region of its effect, suppose we take it at the
higher non-effecting part of Soul; is not plurality of powers to
be found in this part also? The existence of this higher part
will, we may presume, be at once conceded.
But is this existence to be taken as identical with that of the
stone? Surely not. Being in the case of the stone is not Being
pure and simple, but stone-being: so here; Soul's being denotes
not merely Being but Soul-being.
Is then that "being" distinct from what else goes to complete the
essence [or substance] of Soul? Is it to be identified with Bring
[the Absolute], while to some differentia of Being is ascribed
the production of Soul? No doubt Soul is in a sense Being, and
this is not as a man "is" white, but from the fact of its being
purely an essence: in other words, the being it possesses it
holds from no source external to its own essence.
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